While at Magdeburg, he was placed with the Nullbrüder (Brethren of the Common Life), who were not an official monastic order but who nonetheless had gathered together in a monastic-type community and took in student boarders. They lived in relative poverty but, unlike most actual monks, did not resort to begging, choosing instead to make a living by copying books, because printing presses had not yet become commonplace. Luther would here have for the first time been exposed to lives of serious piety, and it follows that any penchant he might have had for taking God more seriously than the
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